Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today's stories:
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation announced that they have awarded more than $700,000 to publishers through their joint Humanities Open Book Program. The selected publishers will secure the rights to a group of out-of-print books and make them available as free e-books under a Creative Commons license. NEH chairman William D. Adams said that the project will “put important out-of-print books into the hands of the public, widening access to the ideas and information they contain, and inspiring readers, teachers, and students to use them in exciting new ways.”
Meanwhile, after nearly a decade of decreasing print books sales in the United States, it appears that print may be making a comeback. A recent report from Nielsen BookScan reveals that sales of physical books in the United States have increased from 559 million in 2014 to 571 million in 2015. (Quartz)
“I am an artist through to my marrow.” The Guardian profiles poet Robin Coste Lewis’s path to becoming a writer and the publication of her National Book Award–winning debut collection, Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems. Read more about Lewis and nine other poets who published their first collections in 2015 in Poets & Writers Magazine’s eleventh annual look at debut poets.
Speaking of debuts, Stuart Emmrich considers the dramatic emergence of debut novelist Garth Risk Hallberg, who received a $2 million advance from Knopf for his nine-hundred-page novel, City on Fire, which was published in October. (New York Times)
At Granta, novelists Patrick deWitt and Neel Mukherjee discuss their writing routines, literary influences—both conscious and subconscious—and their respective books, Undermajordomo Minor and The Lives of Others.
In Munich, German trade publisher Bastei Lübbe and book retailer Hugendubel have created a book vending machine that will allow customers to exchange their unwanted Christmas presents for a Bastei Lübbe book. The machine will be set up outside Hugendubel bookstores from December 28 to December 30. It’s a win-win: Customers receive a brand new book, and all unwanted presents will be given to local charities. (Bookseller)
The Atlantic’s Joe Fassler shares selections from the past twelve months of his By Heart series of author interviews, in which nearly thirty authors including Kevin Barry, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Angela Flournoy, and Mary Gaitskill shared their favorite passages from literature, as well as their insights on craft and the creative process.
